A random tablet doodle that turned out surprisingly well for how tired I was last night. I was just experimenting with oviraptorosaurs having plumage more like an ostrich and being adorably fluffy.

One of my paleoart pet peeves is when artists under-feather dinosaurs, as if they're begrudgingly painting a token thin veneer of drab integument onto the scaly dino shapes they grew up with and can't seem to shake. I love seeing artists get more creative with dinosaur soft tissue, because the more we learn about these incredible creatures, the more we discover that they were just as variable and visually interesting as modern animals. Most vertebrates actually look quite different from what their skeleton alone suggests, so it's silly to suppose that dinosaurs were the exception. It's the 21st century; let's move on from shrink-wrapped skin and noncommittal feathers, and start depicting dinos as real, functional biological organisms.

/rant

 Couple of oviraptorosaur hand studies from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Ovis are one of my favorite dinosaur groups (the other two are therizinosaurs and abelisaurs), so I'm super psyched that ovi eggs have been found in the Wayan Formation and their (for now rather conjectural) parent is the star of the museum's current dinosaur exhibit.

One thing I'm not sure many people realize or appreciate is that (most) theropods actually had an opposable first digit and could grasp things very similarly to humans. So dromaeosaurs were really even more capable of opening doors than Jurassic Park depicts*! :)

Ovis probably had quite a bit more feathering than this, including ample pennaceous feathering on the arm, but I omitted those feathers in the interest of modeling their very cool hands.

*The caveat here is that theropods could not rotate their hands at the wrist like we can, so they couldn't really grab a doorknob and twist at the hand; they would have to move their entire arm from the shoulder. Yes, I have overthought this.

 I was noodling around on my tablet and ended up sketching a very rough mockup of a potential cover for the novel I'm working on. It's a tale of two sisters--one on a character-building epic quest, and the other on an inner journey of self-discovery. It's also got magic and creatures and a goat demigod. Good times.

I was kinda playing around with making it look like an 80's fantasy film poster, because those were my childhood. <3 We'll see if I go with this for the actual cover. (I'm still trying to figure out Saturos's hair. He's being difficult. I'll get him right one of these days.)

The critters in the top left corner are things I actually made up in high school, and then completely forgot about until I realized they would work great in this story.

 Actually, they should make that game.